Notice: Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly. Translation loading for the captcha-bank domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home1/c306474/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131
Notice: Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly. Translation loading for the email-users domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home1/c306474/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131
Notice: Function _load_textdomain_just_in_time was called incorrectly. Translation loading for the wordpress-seo domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home1/c306474/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131 african music Archives - TalkAfrique Deprecated: Function WP_Dependencies->add_data() was called with an argument that is deprecated since version 6.9.0! IE conditional comments are ignored by all supported browsers. in /home1/c306474/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131
Deprecated: Function WP_Dependencies->add_data() was called with an argument that is deprecated since version 6.9.0! IE conditional comments are ignored by all supported browsers. in /home1/c306474/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131
The United Nations intellectual property agency today announced a project to help musical artists in 11 West African countries to get paid for their work through a single, standardized registration system.
Francis Gurry, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), said in a press statement released in Brussels, that the new system, to be developed in cooperation with Google, will mean that “that a right holder will only have to register a work once to have the information stored across the 11 countries.”
Mr. Gurry announced the project during a keynote presentation at the third World Copyright Summit, organized by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) in Brussels.
The 11 countries involved in the current phase of the project are Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo.
Rights holders in the 11 countries currently have to register their rights in each of the countries, meaning greater administrative costs and a difficult search for a radio producer or film director who wants to license a piece of African music, WIPO said.
The new system “will make it simpler to license music across the set of countries and will reduce costs for creators,” WIPO said.
“It will immediately benefit creators and rights holders, who will be more easily identified by people wanting to license their works. It will also help music licensing bodies, such as radio stations, streaming services and others, who want to include African music in their offerings,” WIPO said.
“Consumers will benefit by having greater access to this music as a result.”
On India.Arie’s last album, she blended a world music sound with her signature style of soul. She’s planning to take things to the next level on an upcoming CD with Israeli singer Idan Raichel.
“I always go different (and) I went even farther,” India.Arie said in a recent interview.
The album, “Open Door,” will be released this summer. It will feature songs in Hebrew and English, though India.Arie doesn’t know Hebrew, explaining that Raichel “teaches me the translation.”
While vacationing in Israel, the 34-year-old singer asked locals who the most influential political singer-songwriter was in town.
“Everybody said, ‘Idan Raichel, Idan Raichel — same name all the time,'” she recalled. “So I just went to his little apartment, I heard his music and was like, ‘That’s my music!'”
Raichel, the dreadlocked composer who uniquely blends Israeli, Ethiopian, Yemenite and Latin sounds, is mainly known for his role in the group The Idan Raichel Project. The Project has some 90 revolving members from Sudan, Uruguay, Colombia and Rwanda. They sing primarily in Hebrew, Spanish, Arabic and Swahili, and bandmates range in age from 16 to people in their 80s.
The Project burst onto the Israeli scene in 2002 and has released three successful albums.
India.Arie and Raichel, 33, can been seen in a YouTube video for their song, “Gift of Acceptance.” The two performed the tune in December at the Nobel Peace concert in honour of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo in Oslo, Norway. They also held special concerts in Los Angeles and Atlanta to promote the upcoming CD.
“People were crying and (there was) a lot of good feedback,” said India.Arie, who is also planning an international tour with Raichel.
“Open Door” will be the soul singer’s fifth CD. Her first three albums were multiplatinum, platinum and gold successes. But 2009’s “Testimony: Vol. 2, Love & Politics” didn’t match her previous efforts, only selling 320,000 units, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Though the disc may — or may not — be a hit for the multiple Grammy winner, India.Arie says she’s not concerned with album sales, thanks to the encouraging support from family, friends and fans.
“My family especially, they’re like, ‘Oh my god India, why are you doing this? We don’t know who’s going to buy it,'” she recalled.
“My mom cries every time she hears the songs,” she continued. “…They kept saying stuff like, ‘This is you, but different. It’s almost like you can do anything, but it’s still you.
In the mid-1990s, as the use of mobile phones spread in much of the developed world, few thought of Africa as a potential market. Now, with more than 400 million subscribers, its market is larger than North America’s and is growing faster than in any other region.
A similar story now seems again to be unfolding as Africans use their cell phones to connect to “social media” ─ Internet services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube ─ that allow people to interact with each other directly. In the process, they are joining what may be the next global trend: a shift to mobile Internet use, with social media as its main driver. According to Mary Meeker, an influential Internet analyst, mobile Internet and social media are the fastest growing areas of the technology industry worldwide, and she predicts that wireless telephones use will soon overtake computers as the primary Internet device.
Africa is pushing both developments. Studies suggest that when Africans go online (predominantly with their mobile phones), they spend much of their time on social media sites. In recent months, Facebook ─ the major social media platform worldwide and currently the most visited website in most of Africa ─ has seen a massive growth on the continent. The number of Facebook users now stands at over 17 million, up from just10 million in 2009. More than 15 per cent of people online in Africa are currently using the platform, compare to 11 per cent in Asia. Two other social networking websites, Twitter and YouTube, rank among the most visited websites in most African countries.
African sports, music and film stars, political leaders and companies have joined the global conversation. The Facebook fan base of Ivorian football star and UN goodwill ambassador Didier Drogba is approaching 1 million. Zambian author and economist Dambisa Moyo has more than 26,000 followers on Twitter. Companies such as Kenya Airways and media organizations in South Africa are using various social media platforms to interact better with customers and readers. During recent elections in Côte d’Ivoire, candidates not only toured the cities and villages; they also moved the contest online, posting campaign updates on Twitter and Facebook.
Constraints and opportunities
Africa’s embrace of social media is even more striking given the low number of Africans using the Internet and the many hurdles they face trying to go online.
Africa’s 100 million Internet users make the continent the region in the world with the lowest penetration rate and a tiny minority of the 2 billion people online around the world. Among the many reasons for this poor showing are the scarcity and prohibitive costs of high speed internet connections and the limited number of personal computers in use.
But these challenges simultaneously contribute to the growth in the use of mobile Internet, which in recent years has been the highest in the world. “Triple-digit growth rates are routine across the continent,” notes Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera, the world’s most popular mobile phone Internet browser. “The widespread availability of mobile phones means that the mobile web can reach tens of millions more than the wired web.” As with the rapid growth in use of mobile phones in Africa in recent years, Mr. Tetzchner believes that the “mobile web is beginning to reshape the economic, political and social development of the continent.”
‘Seismic shift’ coming
Erik Hersman, a prominent African social media blogger and entrepreneur is equally enthusiastic. In an e-mail to Africa Renewal, he notes that “with mobile phone penetration already high across the continent, and as we get to critical mass with Internet usage in some of Africa’s leading countries (Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt) … a seismic shift will happen with services, products and information.”
These growth rates are persuading major companies to invest in reaching Africa’s expanding pool of Internet users. Facebook, after launching versions in some of the major African languages, including Swahili, Hausa and Zulu in May, has announced it will offer free access to its platform to mobile phone users in many parts of Africa. In October Google started testing a new service for Swahili speakers in East and Central Africa. Tentatively called “Baraza” (“meeting place” in Swahili), it will allows people to interact and share knowledge by asking and answering questions, many of them of only very local or regional interest.
Africans are also cashing in on the local market. In South Africa, MXit, a free instant messaging application with an estimated 7 million users, is the most popular local social networking service. From Accra and Abidjan to Lusaka and Nairobi, African programmers are designing and launching new home-grown platforms and tools that will keep the African online conversation going and growing in the years ahead.
André-Michel Essoungou is a writer for UN Africa Renewal magazine based in New York City
First of all let me say that I’m not a journalist. I’m a chemist. What I do here is called blogging. Blogging gives me more latitude to cover whatever crosses my mind hoping somebody will read them.
For the past few weeks, I have been writing heavily on malaria, Robert and Grace Mugabe, poverty in Africa and the responsibilities of developed nations towards Africa.
I would like to digress today. I’ll attempt to talk about fashion.
As we say, ladies first. I’ve being observing this one shoulder bandwagon for a while. As a disclaimer, let me say that I find them cool, cute, and flirty- all at the same time (in fact, most of the time). I always thought this one shoulder thing was an American trend until I visited Ghana in March/April this year. I was there for a few weeks but I had the opportunity to attend a funeral one Saturday. By the way, if you’re uniformed, Saturday’s are for funeral in Ghana, unless you’re an Adventist.
]It was at this funeral that I realized how mistaken I was. As a scientist, I hate to give unsubstantiated percentages unless I have the figures to calculate them. However, from my ‘guesstimation’, l can say that half of the women I saw at the funeral were one-shoulder moms. So it wasn’t an American thing, after all. Another surprising observation I made was that, this one-shoulder phenomenon is no respecter of age. I could easily spot one shoulders among teens, twenty somethings, thirty somethings, all the way into the seventy somethings.
“Ok so this one-shoulder trend is a global phenomenon”. I accepted with some childlike guilt.
And those women 5000 miles away even know how to make it extra youthful and classy than their western counterparts. I never knew you could combine a one-shoulder dress and a head scarf and blow it up with a bold belt. What a new twist. I saw it live and they looked kind of neat. What they probably need is some tight strapless bras to go with their one shoulders, and they’ll surely be unstoppable.
If air tickets down a little bit, I”ll repeat my adventure next spring. I’ll report back what I see. No shoulders? You bet. Perhaps, it no new thing over there.
